CK and I will be on a photo and video shoot in Colorado this week (CK’s already there, as a matter of fact; I’ll be joining him tomorrow). Blogging will be spotty at best, so I figured I’d give you a little something to keep you occupied for a while. Behold: Meenakshi Amman Temple. Not every photo is great, but each is worth seeing.
After all these years, “Arena” remains one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. Watching this brilliant commercial, it’s not hard to see why.
Okay, this is pretty cool. Music + art + science = full frontal geekery, as far as I’m concerned. (Though I still can’t quite say “Uranus” without stifling a giggle.)
Given the nature of today’s collection, we probably should have saved these links for “Weird Wednesday”:
The mysterious death of George Haycock.
“Be the Gifting Hero this year with a hand sculpted Bust of your Family and Friends!” Only $120!
Photos of the Golden Tortoise Beetle.
Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” has been clocked at around 3 trillion meters a second.
Want to be a spy? Here’s a handy a list of shibboleths.
Somehow, we let yesterday slip by without acknowledging an important birthday: Mr. Rogers would have been 85 if he hadn’t died in 2003. Mental Floss’s John Green presents 35 facts about the educator, minister, author, composer, and Peabody Award-winning television host:
It’s been a while since we did a book review around here. And while I’m not quite finished with it yet, I’ll go ahead and pronounce Michael Korda’s Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Contrast that with some of the one-star reviews on Amazon:
“Korda takes a fascinating topic and destroys it with horrendously opaque writing. Early on, I encountered, on page 11, a sentence with 51 words. Incredibly, later on the same page there is a sentence with 114 words. There is simply no excuse for this.”
A sentence with 51 words?!? OMG!!! Maybe you should stick with the Twilight series.
“I find the book too detailed, tedious and the author seems to be physco-analizing [sic] T.E. Lawerence [sic]. He keeps straying away from the main theme.”
Um…you do realize, don’t you, that Lawrence is the main theme? And that if Korda wanted to psychoanalyze him (which, 500-odd pages into his 700-page book, he has yet to do), wouldn’t that be in keeping with the “theme”?
“I wanted to like this book, and really tried to. But the first 100 pages are terribly boring. And frankly the writing is not fluid or entertaining. It was a chore to finish.”
Julius Caesar was stabbed on this day in 44 B.C. But you already knew that, right? We’re mentioning it to make a point.
Shakespeare describes the scene thus:
Caesar: Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?
Casca: Speak, hands, for me! [They stab Caesar.]
Caesar: Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar! [Dies.]
Cinna: Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Did you catch that “Et tu, Brute” line? And you, Brutus? Sounds to me like Caesar started a sentence with a conjunction. Uh oh. If he were enrolled in a high school English class today, he’d probably get a frowny face on his paper. He’d still be right, though. Dead, but right.
Jessica Lahey, a middle-school teacher, wrings her hands over the fact that, in our oppressive world, spelling matters.
“Ideas should be judged on substance rather than appearances,” she writes, “but this simply is not how our world works. We live in a society where appearances matter, where in order to be heard and taken seriously we are judged quickly and superficially.” And, she goes on, she teaches her students “to dream about a world in which they can be respected for the content of their thoughts rather than for…the placement of their commas.”
I’m not sure where to begin, other than to suggest that if you can’t grasp a few simple rules about your native language, then I really don’t care about the content of your thoughts—nor should anyone else.
Back when I was studying music in college, there always seemed to be those who wanted to skip jazz theory and jump right into free improvisation, imagining that all those archaic rules about scales and chords and harmonic progression unfairly prevented them from the true expression of their musical ideas. The results were unambiguously disastrous.
It’s the same thing with spelling and grammar. If you can’t tell the difference between your and you’re, how to spot a comma splice, and whether a particular verb requires a direct object, you might want to see if you can sit in on a couple of eighth-grade English classes before blessing us with your profound insights.
Giant demon mosquitoes, awakened from a deep slumber by Tropical Storm Debbie, are heading toward Florida. And they’re not happy.
Neanderthals became extinct because they couldn’t catch rabbits? If only they’d met this guy.
Massive pigeon fireball blamed for ditch blaze: “Sparks went everywhere, some pigeons were incinerated, others dropped into the ditch and the fire raged.”
A plague of locusts just landed in the Giza region of Egypt. Next up: “…a thick darkness in all the land.”
It appears that my glass-half-empty world view has been vindicated. Told you so.
Last night at the MAC, CK addressed a gathering of members of the Spokane chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Following the presentation, he and I were on hand to answer questions and provide piercing insight into the subject of Modern architecture. As can be imagined, fun and frivolity were very much the order of the evening.
Okay, fine. We’ll do one more SPOMa post. (Why? Because we can.) Here’s a story about the exhibit from Steve Jackson over at KPBX. Steve’s a real pro—and the missus tells me I don’t sound like a complete idiot, so there’s that.
Now that everyone’s fully recovered from the celebratory soirée—ashtrays cleaned, empty bottles tossed, farm animals returned to their rightful owners—we can report on last Friday’s SPOMa opening at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture: it was an unqualified and resounding success. Above, two attendees in appropriate period attire* gaze at a rare Alvar Aalto model of the library at Mount Angel Abbey (photograph by Photo Ramsey).
*The fact that both ensembles happen to closely match helveticka’s colors is purely coincidental, we can assure you.
Van Cliburn died yesterday. A reluctant cold warrior, the pianist beat the commies at their own game, winning first place at the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. And the best part? He was a Texan. Above, Cliburn and his mother at a performance in Gorkiy in 1962. Photograph by Leonid Bergoltsev.
Hard to believe that, in just three days, SPOMa will finally be opened to the public. Some folks have been waiting for two years for this to happen; others—like regular readers of this blog, who by now have grown weary of the constant reminders that we’re doing an exhibit and prefer the usual hard-hitting investigative reporting and links to cat videos—just want things to go back to normal. Soon, soon.
Oh, and don’t forget to tell all your friends.
